I’ll try to make one more attempt and bridging where possible outrage may be coming from and why it is completely unwarranted and generally hostile to us moving forward on the IC.
I think the disconnect comes from a differing set of presuppositions about how the NNS works and regulates itself. I come with drawings!
As we move from DFINITY controlling a topic(For our discussion we’ll look at 1. Node Rewards 2. Governance 3. Treasury Distribution(speculative), each topic will move from a position where DFINITY controls most of the Voting Power to a position where DFINITY holds a minority of the voting power. To make this work, in the second position, there has to be a mechanism in place to make sure that, in all instances, short-term value seekers(whether it be legitimate stakeholders looking to cash in, projects that would allocate resources for themselves at the expense of others, or adversarial agents looking to tear the network down) cannot gain control of the network.
How is this done? Skin in the game. We all lock our neurons so that we have to live with the consequences of our actions. This is the fulcrum that we move around and EVERYTHING in the NNS hinges on this holding true. If this does not hold true then we have no effective NNS. It is the reason that proposals to shorten staking time or lack of action on a neuron market are so dangerous to our long-term health.
The folks that are outraged need to understand that the people proposing an NNS treasury are operating in this world. The world looks like this:
NNS Treasury proposers are proposing a solution where, in their reality, it is impossible for them to make your worst fears come true because of the inherent configuration of the network. If the treasury existed, and if they tried to fund themselves, it could not pass unless 1. The network felt the funding benefited the long-term value of the network or 2. Significant Information Asymetrry was introduced to ‘trick’ the network into thinking that there was long-term value.
My suspicion is that some people are feeling a deep-felt information asymmetry. This makes sense to me as it is clearly the biggest threat to the network. If you feel that we’ve purposely created that asymmetry then I’m sure you are pissed and angry.
The way to eliminate your concerns in the future is to eliminate this information asymmetry. I think having a two-step proposal process would help this considerably. DFINITY laying out its positions as in this post is important as well.
The other solution is to make sure we violently reject any proposal where there exists a modicum of information asymmetry. @cryptoisgood is embodying this aggressively on twitter with his Known Neuron rejection if you haven’t posted to the forum. Is that gating? Maybe, but it is less dangerous than maintaining information asymmetry.
As far as the discussion of the NNS treasury goes, we had multiple posts on it here at the forum. There was one meeting held in person amongst a few people, but I can think of nothing discussed during that that wasn’t generally public in the forum. Fixing this asymmetry is a valid concern, but there is no reason to convert into malice and bad faith. The people who considered the idea to be a good one were living in a world where your worst fears were impossible. Please consider ascribing them some good faith. If they are wrong our experiment is already doomed.
Until we have better protection against the asymmetry, the only protection you have is paying attention to this forum and other places of discussion. This sucks because we’re all trying to build. I’m hoping some process is coming out of the working groups that will include proper documentation of discussions, objections, and mitigations.
If we live in a world where we solve information asymmetry then there should be no functional difference between our scenarios 1, 2, and 3. We shouldn’t be able to pass node rewards, governance proposals, or treasury distributions unless the network collectively agrees that it improves the long-term value of the network.
As far as folks that want an ethos or are concerned about long-term value that may overstep moral lines, we are going to have to human our way through that…there is no mechanism currently in place to keep it from happening. That is scary as hell, but where we are. This is also worth a deep discussion and consideration.
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